Flashback Where's the Beef?

November 11, 2008

“Attack is fun. It gets the juices flowing, but it's not what people want.”
Gary Hart, presidential candidate, 1984

When it comes to low-road politics, the current practitioners have nothing on the Founding Fathers. John Adams? A man of "hideous hermaphroditical character." Thomas Jefferson? "The son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." Not how we remember them, perhaps, but how each was characterized in 1800 by the other's campaign. (CNN.com has more on this Olympian contest.)

Nearly two centuries later, Lee Atwater took the fine art of negative campaigning to new heights -- or is it depths. Atwater's exploits, culminating in George Bush Senior's kidney-punch campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, are vividly chronicled in Boogie Man, airing this week on FRONTLINE. The story has some exquisite twists and turns -- Atwater was nothing if not creative -- but fits squarely in the grand American tradition of doing whatever it takes to win the White House.

As evidence of how little has changed, we offer these two excerpts from a 1984 FRONTLINE called So You Want to Be President, an inside account of Gary Hart's dramatic, if ultimately ill-fated, first run at the Oval Office. In the first clip, early in the race, the candidate admonishes his ad man to accentuate the positive. In the second, Hart, now a real contender, is bloodied by an old pro, Walter Mondale, but his cornermen don't appear to notice.